E-Procurement software facilitates the purchase and sale of goods and services through the internet and intranet networking systems. Generally, the system starts with an employee at a business identifying a purchase need. The employee may then log in and fill out a formal written request called a requisition to request fulfilment of that need. The requisition is then submitted to higher level employees or managers for approval.
Depending on the workflow of the requisition document, multiple managers may need to approve a requisition. Each level of approval would require some form of authentication and authorization. Eventually, the approved requisition is transformed into a purchase order issued to a supplier. Most procurement software then sends this purchase order as an email to the supplier. In many systems, this is the end of the process.
In other approaches, the supplier is requested to register and log in to a special procurement system to view purchase order details and turn the purchase order into an invoice. The benefit of this approach is that a supplier does not have to generate an invoice from scratch. Instead, the purchase order information is mirrored to an invoice generation form, and the supplier only needs to add additional invoice data to the form before publishing the data as an invoice and sending it back to the buyer.
While this functionality seems highly efficient, many suppliers fail to take advantage of the purchase order information being imported directly into the invoice form because of the work associated with the registration and log in requirements. These requirements are a necessary prophylactic measure for the buyer or any intermediary entity maintaining the software to prevent bots and would be attackers from accessing the system. Information in the system includes not only requisition, purchase order, and invoice data for every transaction, but also names, passwords, information of employees and vendors, shipping and billing information, inventory, projects, bids, contracts, discounts, liquidity, supplier performance, disputed expenses, forecasts, and other information that may or may not be related to enterprise resource planning and electronic data interchange software.
Registration and logging in are methods of effecting computing security. In the field of computing, a secure system includes authentication, ensuring a user is who he or she claims to be, and authorization, defining the access rights of each user. Authentication is commonly based on connecting an account to one of three factors: something the user “has”, something the user “knows”, or something the user “is.” Authorization is commonly based on associating an account with a permission group for a group of files. The permission group has access to different rights with regard to a file. For example, an account in the permission group “super user” may have four access permissions (Read, Write, Execute, and Delete) to every file in a system while an account in the permission group “guest” may only have read and write access to some files in the system.
An additional setback to using this functionality is user interface and user experience. Essentially, suppliers are reluctant to create account information and learn a new interface for an external system. If the log in name and password are standardized within a company for outside services, then creating an account with that name and password requires some form of consideration on whether the site is a trusted site. After providing the sign up information, a user is likely to be sent to a home page/splash page. Navigating around a site looking for the necessary purchase order to invoice form can be a frustrating experience. The authentication and authorization for a supplier account increases the site wide bounce rate.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.